Archetypes and Mental Illness: A look into mental illness and how it is portrayed in media, featuring characters from the CW’s Supernatural.

My body of work is personifying mental illness using CW’s show Supernatural as a backdrop. When watching the show, you see incredible people doing incredible things, but also see the things they face silently and sometimes alone, their struggle unknown to anyone but themselves and the audience. In this portfolio, I chose to take the characters and their archetypes and place them side by side with these hidden struggles.

Each set of photos is a diptych with the first photo on the left being the archetype of the character and the photo on the right being their illness or coping mechanism. The archetype photos are all desaturated to resemble the first season of the show and the style they chose to shoot in. The secondary photos are black and white to show they are the hidden side to each archetype.  All photos are shot with one main light and a 50mm lens.

As someone who personally struggles with mental illness and having had to overcome many negative coping behaviors, I felt that this project was important to show how, even when someone seems to be on top of the world, on top of their game or have it all figured out, there are many who struggle with hidden pain. I felt it was important to highlight the silent struggle that these people face in their daily lives.

I specifically chose the show Supernatural because the characters themselves deal with many of these issues, but more importantly, because the cast and crew host several fundraisers to raise awareness for mental illnesses.